The Role of Institutions in Shaping the Opportunities and Constraints on Actors’ Behaviour

Abstract

This chapter will deal with the role and importance of institutions in structuring the political environment. The institutional make-up and its impact on the political actors’ scope of options and actions, in combination with the creation of modes of conduct and dominating discourses, are key issues in understanding how political parties and migrant organisations respond to and utilise ethnicity as a territory for mobilisation. Furthermore, national models of citizenship are an important additional institution that sheds light on important cross-national differences in the modes of inclusions and exclusion of migrants and ethnic minorities (Brubaker, 1992; Koopmans and Statham, 1999). The institutional framework will also enable us to explain variance in identification levels and what role identification plays with regard to political participation. This will be explored in Chapter 4.KeywordsInterest GroupPolitical PartyTrade UnionPolitical ParticipationPolitical InstitutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.